基于GPU的视点相关自适应细分

利用GPU的强大浮点数计算能力和并行处理能力,提出一种完全基于GPU的视点相关自适应细分内核进行快速细分计算的方法.在GPU中,依次实现视点相关的面片细分深度值计算、基于基函数表的细分表面顶点求值、细分表面绘制等核心步骤,无须与CPU端系统内存进行几何数据交换.视点相关的自适应细分准则在表面绘制精度保持不变的情况下,有效地降低了细分表面的细分深度和细分的计算量,在此基础上完全基于GPU的细分框架使得曲面细分具有快速高效的特点.该方法还可以在局部重要细节用较大深度值进行实时自适应细分,以逼近极限曲面.     

Perception-motivated multiresolution rendering on sole-cube maps

This paper presents a novel GPU-based multiresolution rendering on sole-cube maps (SCMs), which is a variant of geometry images built upon spherical parameterization. Given spherical parametrization of a manifold mesh, the sphere domain is gnomonically projected to a closed cube, which constitutes the 6-chart sole-cube maps. A quadtree structure of SCMs and normal map atlas are then constructed by using the regular re-sampling. Then, by packing the quadtree nodes into the SCMs texture atlas, a new parallel multiresolution rendering is processed on the latest GPU in two rendering passes: the multiresolution node selection in fragment shader; the triangulation in vertex shader followed by the node culling operation in geometry shader. The proposed approach generates adaptive mesh surfaces dynamically, and can be fully implemented in GPU parallelization. The proposed scheme alleviates the computing load of multiresolution mesh refinement on CPU, and our GPU-based multiresolution rendering is demonstrated with a variety of examples. Our user study confirmed that the visual quality of the SCMs multiresolution rendering, in comparison with the meshes/geometry images rendering, is also highly efficient especially for complex models in large-scale virtual environment.     

Hardware‐Assisted Projected Tetrahedra

We present a flexible and highly efficient hardware‐assisted volume renderer grounded on the original Projected Tetrahedra (PT) algorithm. Unlike recent similar approaches, our method is exclusively based on the rasterization of simple geometric primitives and takes full advantage of graphics hardware. Both vertex and geometry shaders are used to compute the tetrahedral projection, while the volume ray integral is evaluated in a fragment shader; hence, volume rendering is performed entirely on the GPU within a single pass through the pipeline. We apply a CUDA‐based visibility ordering achieving rendering and sorting performance of over 6 M Tet/s for unstructured datasets. Furthermore, as each tetrahedron is processed independently, we employ a data‐parallel solution which is neither bound by GPU memory size nor does it rely on auxiliary volume information. In addition, iso‐surfaces can be readily extracted during the rendering process, and time‐varying data are handled without extra burden.     

Interactive GPU-based adaptive cartoon-style rendering

In this paper we present a novel real-time cartoon-style rendering approach, which targets very large meshes. Cartoon drawing usually uses a limited number of colors for shading and emphasizes special effects, such as sharp curvature and silhouettes. It also paints the remaining large regions with uniform solid colors. Our approach quantizes light intensity to generate different shadow colors and utilizes multiresolution mesh hierarchy to maintain appropriate levels of detail across various regions of the mesh. To comply with visual requirements, our algorithm exploits graphics hardware programmability to draw smooth silhouette and color boundaries within the vertex and fragment processors. We have adopted a simplification scheme that executes simplification operators without incurring extra simplification operations as a precondition. The real-time refinement of the mesh, which is performed by the graphics processing unit (GPU), dramatically improves image quality and reduces CPU load.     

屏幕空间自适应的地形Tessellation绘制

为了在大规模真实感地形渲染中利用GPU硬件加速的Tessellation技术,在对地形Tessellation原理分析的基础上,提出一种屏幕空间自适应的地形Tessellation绘制算法,实现了在GPU内部对地形模型的三角形自适应细分。该算法采用Tile和Patch的形式对地形数据进行分层组织,在CPU和GPU上分别以Tile和Patch为基础实现地形LOD(level of detail)的自适应简化;提出在Hull Shader上基于Patch边界的细分系数计算模型,确保了Patch细分时的无缝连接;给出了Domain Shader上置换贴图的处理过程,以实现细分顶点的高程纹理映射;并且采用了两级视锥体裁剪机制,减少了渲染数据的冗余量。实验结果表明,该算法具有较好的屏幕空间自适应性和渲染性能,能够在输入粗糙网格的基础上,渲染输出高分辨率几何细节特征的地形模型。     

Efficient Geometry Compression for GPU-based Decoding in Realtime Terrain Rendering

We present a geometry compression scheme for restricted quadtree meshes and use this scheme for the compression of adaptively triangulated digital elevation models (DEMs). A compression factor of 8–9 is achieved by employing a generalized strip representation of quadtree meshes to incrementally encode vertex positions. In combination with adaptive error-controlled triangulation, this allows us to significantly reduce bandwidth requirements in the rendering of large DEMs that have to be paged from disk. The compression scheme is specifically tailored for GPU-based decoding, since it minimizes dependent memory access operations. We can thus trade CPU operations and CPU–GPU data transfer for GPU processing, resulting in twice faster streaming of DEMs from main memory into GPU memory. A novel storage format for decoded DEMs on the GPU facilitates a sustained rendering throughput of about 300 million triangles per second. Due to these properties, the proposed scheme enables scalable rendering with respect to the display resolution independent of the data size. For a maximum screen-space error below 1 pixel it achieves frame rates of over 100 fps, even on high-resolution displays. We validate the efficiency of the proposed method by presenting experimental results on scanned elevation models of several hundred gigabytes.     

Accurate and efficient lighting for skinned models

In the context of real‐time, GPU‐based rendering of animated skinned meshes, we propose a new algorithm to compute surface normals with minimal overhead both in terms of the memory footprint and the required per‐vertex operations. By accounting for the variation of the skinning weights over the surface, we achieve a higher visual quality compared to the standard approximation ubiquitously used in video‐game engines and other real‐time applications. Our method supports Linear Blend Skinning and Dual Quaternion Skinning. We demonstrate the advantages of our technique on a variety of datasets and provide a complete open‐source implementation, including GLSL shaders.     

Fast Parallel Construction of Smooth Surfaces from Meshes with Tri/Quad/Pent Facets

Polyhedral meshes consisting of triangles, quads, and pentagons and polar configurations cover all major sampling and modeling scenarios. We give an algorithm for efficient local, parallel conversion of such meshes to an everywhere smooth surface consisting of low‐degree polynomial pieces. Quadrilateral facets with 4‐valent vertices are ‘regular’ and are mapped to bi‐cubic patches so that adjacent bi‐cubics join C² as for cubic tensor‐product splines. The algorithm can be implemented in the vertex and geometry shaders of the GPU pipeline and does not use the fragment shader. Its implementation in DirectX 10 achieves conversion plus rendering at 659 frames per second with 42.5 million triangles per second on input of a model of 1300 facets of which 60% are not regular.     

基于几何着色器的Shadow Volume实时阴影实现

通过几何着色器生成Shadow Volume实时阴影。利用几何着色器能生成新顶点与输出流的特性,将以往由CPU完成的产生封闭阴影体的计算转移到图形处理器中实现。该实现能提高算法渲染效率,可以进一步解放CPU的处理时间。比传统先由CPU生成阴影体雏形的方法更简单,性能更优秀。     

基于几何着色器的Shadow Volume实时阴影实现

通过几何着色器生成Shadow Volume实时阴影。利用几何着色器能生成新顶点与输出流的特性,将以往由CPU完成的产生封闭阴影体的计算转移到图形处理器中实现。该实现能提高算法渲染效率,可以进一步解放CPU的处理时间。比传统先由CPU生成阴影体雏形的方法更简单,性能更优秀。     

利用GPU进行实时大规模3D地形渲染的方法研究

提出了通过GPU渲染地形的一种简易方法,首要的任务就是将高度场的查询及批LOD处理也从CPU移至GPU。顶点位置可结合层级索引模板由顶点着色器计算给出,然后,对地形顶点采用适当的图元进行索引,调用一次API就可绘制所有的三角形。最后,添加额外的“裙摆顶点”来填补由批LOD算法造成的裂缝。该算法不必每帧都更新顶点缓冲,从而大大减少了系统内存和CPU的开销。     

Volume and Isosurface Rendering with GPU‐Accelerated Cell Projection*

We present an efficient Graphics Processing Unit GPU‐based implementation of the Projected Tetrahedra (PT) algorithm. By reducing most of the CPU–GPU data transfer, the algorithm achieves interactive frame rates (up to 2.0 M Tets/s) on current graphics hardware. Since no topology information is stored, it requires substantially less memory than recent interactive ray casting approaches. The method uses a two‐pass GPU approach with two fragment shaders. This work includes extended volume inspection capabilities by supporting interactive transfer function editing and isosurface highlighting using a Phong illumination model.     

图形硬件通用计算技术的应用研究

在通用计算的图形硬件加速研究中,综合了在OPENGL体系下的计算模型。通过实验,测试了该计算结构的性能并分析了提高计算性能的一些方法。在此基础上,介绍一种基于GPU的并行计算二维离散余弦变换方法。该方法可在GPU上通过一遍绘制,对一幅图像1至4个颜色通道,同时进行8×8大小像素块的离散余弦变换。实验表明在该实验硬件基础上,采用GPU加速的并行离散余弦变换,可比相同算法的CPU实现提高数百倍。     

基于GPU的点模型实时绘制

近几年随着GPU的可编程能力的增强,很多基于点的绘制算法都可以移植到GPU上来实现,这样既可以让CPU有时间来处理其他事,又可以通过GPU提高算法的运行速度。由于目前的GPU不支持epsilon-z-buffering算法,大部分基于GPU的绘制算法都是通过Multi-pass绘制来达到较高的绘制质量。然而,这些算法需要在第一和第二个pass中光栅化大量的可能可见的面圆,并在第二个pass的像素shader中对这些可能可见的面圆进行大量的计算。本文提出了一种基于GPU的改进Multi-pass绘制算法,与前面的Multi-pass算法相比,我们的算法只需在第一个pass中对大量可能可见的面圆进行光栅化和深度测试后,便可求出所有可见面圆,即离视点最近的面圆。然后在第二个pass中只对这些可见面圆进行光栅化和逐像素计算,从而避免了大量不必要的计算。     

A Flexible Kernel for Adaptive Mesh Refinement on GPU

We present a flexible GPU kernel for adaptive on‐the‐fly refinement of meshes with arbitrary topology. By simply reserving a small amount of GPU memory to store a set of adaptive refinement patterns, on‐the‐fly refinement is performed by the GPU, without any preprocessing nor additional topology data structure. The level of adaptive refinement can be controlled by specifying a per‐vertex depth‐tag, in addition to usual position, normal, color and texture coordinates. This depth‐tag is used by the kernel to instanciate the correct refinement pattern, which will map a refined connectivity on the input coarse polygon. Finally, the refined patch produced for each triangle can be displaced by the vertex shader, using any kind of geometric refinement, such as Bezier patch smoothing, scalar valued displacement, procedural geometry synthesis or subdivision surfaces. This refinement engine does neither require multipass rendering nor any use of fragment processing nor special preprocess of the input mesh structure. It can be implemented on any GPU with vertex shading capabilities.     

Adaptive Caustic Maps Using Deferred Shading

Caustic maps provide an interactive image-space method to render caustics, the focusing of light via reflection and refraction. Unfortunately, caustic mapping suffers problems similar to shadow mapping: aliasing from poor sampling and map projection as well as temporal incoherency from frame-to-frame sampling variations. To reduce these problems, researchers have suggested methods ranging from caustic blurring to building a multiresolution caustic map. Yet these all require a fixed photon sampling, precluding the use of importance-based photon densities. This paper introduces adaptive caustic maps. Instead of densely sampling photons via a rasterization pass, we adaptively emit photons using a deferred shading pass. We describe deferred rendering for refractive surfaces, which speeds rendering of refractive geometry up to 25% and with adaptive sampling speeds caustic rendering up to 200%. These benefits are particularly noticable for complex geometry or using millions of photons. While developed for a GPU rasterizer, adaptive caustic map creation can be performed by any renderer that individually traces photons, e.g., a GPU ray tracer.     

基于硬件细分的层次细节地形渲染算法

针对顶点着色器细分地形网格需要额外生成模板、计算细分层次复杂的不足,提出了一种利用细分着色器进行地形网格细分的层次细节(LOD)地形渲染算法。利用分块四叉树组织建立地形粗糙网格的分层结构,以LOD判别函数对活动地形块进行筛选;提出了在细分控制着色器中基于视点三维连续距离的细分因子计算方法,并针对外部细分因子进行处理消除了裂缝;实现在细分计算着色器上的置换贴图,对精细网格的高度分量进行位移。而且将四叉树结构存储至顶点缓冲区,减少中央处理器(CPU)与图形处理器(GPU)的资源交换;引入细分队列加速细分过程。实验证明,该算法具有平滑的细节层次过渡和良好的细分效果,能够有效提高GPU利用率和地形渲染效率。     

Visualization of level-of-detail meshes on the GPU

Extensive research has been carried out in multiresolution models for many decades. The tendency in recent years has been to harness the potential of GPUs to perform the level-of-detail extraction on graphics hardware. The aim of this work is to present a new level-of-detail scheme based on triangles which is both simple and efficient. In this approach, the extraction process updates vertices instead of indices, thus providing a perfect framework for adapting the algorithms to work completely on GPU shaders. One of the key aspects of our proposal is the need for just a single rendering pass in order to obtain the desired geometry. Moreover, coherence among the different approximations is maximized by means of a symmetric extraction algorithm, which performs the same process when refining and coarsening the mesh. Lastly, we also introduce different uses of the scheme to offer continuous and view-dependent resolution.     

Combinatorial Bidirectional Path‐Tracing for Efficient Hybrid CPU/GPU Rendering

This paper presents a reformulation of bidirectional path‐tracing that adequately divides the algorithm into processes efficiently executed in parallel on both the CPU and the GPU. We thus benefit from high‐level optimization techniques such as double buffering, batch processing, and asyncronous execution, as well as from the exploitation of most of the CPU, GPU, and memory bus capabilities. Our approach, while avoiding pure GPU implementation limitations (such as limited complexity of shaders, light or camera models, and processed scene data sets), is more than ten times faster than standard bidirectional path‐tracing implementations, leading to performance suitable for production‐oriented rendering engines.     

SafeGI: Type Checking to Improve Correctness in Rendering System Implementation

Historically, rendering system development has been mainly focused on improving the numerical accuracy of the rendering algorithms and their runtime efficiency. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the correctness not of the algorithms themselves, but of their implementation. Specifically, we show that by combining static type checking and generic programming, rendering system and shader development can take advantage of compile‐time checking to perform dimensional analysis, i.e. to enforce the correctness of physical dimensions and units in light transport, and geometric space analysis, i.e. to ensure that geometric computations respect the spaces in which points, vectors and normals were defined. We demonstrate our methods by implementing a CPU path tracer and a GPU renderer which previews direct illumination. While we build on prior work to develop our implementations, the main contribution of our work is to show that dimensional analysis and geometric space checking can be successfully integrated into the development of rendering systems and shaders.